The Republican / Michael S. GordonRichard K. Sullivan Jr. secretary of the state Executive Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs speaks, at right, during an announcement Tuesday in which the Westmass Area Development Corporation development plans for the Ludlow Mills complex. Others in attendance include, from left, Lawrence Curtis, president, WinnDevelopment, Scott Keen, CEO, HealthSouth Rehabilitation Hospital of Western Massachusetts, Kenneth W. Delude, president Westmass, Aaron Saunders, chair, Ludlow Board of Selectmen, and (behind Sullivan) state Representatives Thomas M. Petrolati, D-Ludlow and Joseph F. Wagner, D-Chicopee.

LUDLOW – The open floors pace with widely-spaced columns and banks of high and wide windows flooded with sunlight made the Mill 10 building at Ludlow Mills perfect for turning jute fiber into twine and burlap sacks.

Those attributes also make the four-floor, 99,440-square-foot building perfect for conversion into independent-living apartments for senior citizens, said Lawrence H. Curtis, president and managing partner of WinnDevelopment.

WinnDevelopment announced its $20 million plans for Building 10 Tuesday. They want to create 83 apartments on four floors. Building 10 was built in 1907.

“Just imagine this space here between the pillars as a central hallway. The logical thing to do is put one apartment on one side and another apartment on the other. They both have access to the central hallway, and they both have access to natural light. You don’t have to build them too deep and waste a lot of space,” Curtis said Tuesday following a news conference inside the dusty cavernous mill building.

Best known locally for rehabilitating the Longhill Gardens apartment complex in Springfield, WinnDevelopment has done 17 mill-redevelopment projects around the state. In Worcester, WinnDevelopment recently completed Canal Lofts, a 64-unit apartment building in the former Chevalier Furniture factory.

“What’s great about this is that we are right here in the center of Ludlow. It is a residential setting,” Curtis said. “We’ve had projects at mills in Maine we had to abandon because the mills were so isolated.”

Also announced Tuesday, HealthSouth Rehabilitation Hospital of Western Massachusetts will build a new $25 million rehabilitation hospital on property at the 170-acre Ludlow Mills Complex. The 53-bed rehabilitation hospital will replace space HealthSouth has in the old Ludlow Hospital a few blocks away. That facility that has become outdated, said Scott R. Kean, chief executive officer of HealthSouth.

“The new hospital will be state-of-the-art with all private rooms and gym with an open floor plan,” Kean said.

HealthSouth has 240 employees who will move, he said.

Both HealthSouth and the WinnDevelopment plan to start construction on their projects late in 2012 and have them open in 2013.

Both are part of what new owner Westmass Area Development Corp. envisions as a $60 million rehabilitation of the Ludlow Mills project.

Kenneth W. Delude, president of Westmass Area Development Corp. said Tuesday that Westmass has finalized the purchase of Ludlow Mills from the Fastenberg family of New York City for about $7 million financed through a consortium of banks: PeoplesBank, Chicopee Savings, Hampden Bank, United Bank, Nuvo Bank and Trust Co., and First Niagara. Westmass has already received a $1.5 million grant from the state.

The town of Ludlow also has $3.7 million in state money to rebuild State Street in front of the complex with new utilities, including a high-pressure natural gas line.

Delude said there will be hundreds of construction jobs at the site once work begins.

Delude said it had about 4,000 employees, many of them children, at its height in the years before World War I. But the Great War disrupted the supply of jute fiber from India, so the company decided to open a mill there instead and shifting production overseas.

The mill went into a long period of decline before closing in the 1960s. After that, the property hosted a number of smaller industrial tenants. Some of those tenants still remain at the mills.

“They’ll have the ability to buy their space if they want to,” Delude said.

Aaron L. Saunders, chairman of the Ludlow Board of Selectmen, said pretty much everyone in town has either worked in the Ludlow Mills or had a friend or family member who worked there years ago.

“What is great is that we have the environmental concerns addressed, not that they were ever very bad,” he said. “So often that concern holds up developments like this.”